The Scary New World of Uneven Sea Water Levels

Ten days later, New York City and parts of the New Jersey and New York coast are still reeling from Super Storm Sandy as yet another nor’easter packing 50 mile per hour winds approaches.

Scientific evidence points out that sea level rises caused by melting polar icecaps caused, in turn, by climate change, are part of the problem. One city that would suffer devastating floods had Sandy hit or a more typical Category Two or Three hurricane comes is Norfolk.

According to a NPR story, there’s clear evidence that water levels are rising around Norfolk. Larry Atkinson, an oceanographer at Old Dominion University says one can tell by looking at the high water marks left on a decades-old sea wall that protects Norfolk’s downtown. The high water brown mark is consistently going higher and during Hurricane Irene last year, the mark was over the top of the wall.

NPR says that one problem is that as icepacks melt because of global warming, the resulting seawater is not being distributed equally around the oceans. It’s like stirring water in a glass with a spoon. Water closest to the glass is higher than that in the center. Exchange the image of the spoon with swirling ocean currents and you get the idea.

For some reason, the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. from about North Carolina northwards is collecting more high water than parts of the coast to the south. It isn’t clear why, but it may explain why Sandy had such a wallop even though it started as a weak Category One hurricane, NPR says..

In Tidewater, another Sandy would be devastating to the Virginia economy and not just in terms of beach houses and tourism lost. Flooded might be Tidewater’s enormous drydocks at shipyards employing 20,000 or more people. The 4,000 people who work at NASA’s Langley Research Center wouldn’t be able to go to work if their homes are flooded even if the runways are protecting from rising waters.

This adds a dark new dimension to the argument about climate change and living in coastal areas. Some posts on Bacons Rebellion have dealt with the issue before and have (believe or not) acknowledged that sea levels are rising. This Bacons Rebellion post does just that but deals mostly with the issue of flood insurance and bad planning.

All true, but the new issue deals with long-term impacts on jobs that are inextricably linked to living near water, such as working at a shipyard, a port facility or a military or scientific installation. It’s a much bigger deal than summer fun in the sun and sand.

A solution could be a $1 billion seawall that might protect some of Norfolk’s neighborhoods. A similar seawall has been pitched around New York running across the mouth of the harbor and also near Hell Gate where the East River meets Long Island Sound. That cost is about $6 billion.

NPR says that a Dutch company has advised Norfolk about such a defense. That makes sense because The Netherlands has centuries of experience dealing with low-lying land.

But Norfolk simply doesn’t have the $1 billion and it’s doubtful New York does, either.

The issue is no longer one of merely complaining about building waterfront homes and insuring them. The new dynamics of ice floes melting and uneven water levels rising is giving the matter new urgency.

4 Responses to The Scary New World of Uneven Sea Water Levels

Uh, if water gets into a shipyard dry dock during a storm, you just pump it out later. That’s how a dry dock works. Don’t lose sleep over the drydocks.
The non-storm tidal levels haven’t quite reached the point for panic.

You also fail to mention that one problem adding to the Hampton Roads area’s potential woes is that the area is sinking. Yes, there is evidence that mean water levels are rising and that means storm surges could be greater, but in some of the most threatened areas, that’s not all that is going on. New Orleans and parts of the Netherlands have always been below mean sea level. But Sandy was a wake-up call for everybody on the coast who figures the odds protect them. That part of the US had not been hit like that for decades. But it has been hit like that before, surely.

” A 12-foot wall of water slammed into this area a week ago yesterday, leaving high water marks over garage doors, trapping families for days on their second floors, and pulling down telephone poles and breaking windows a half mile inland”

Now take a pencil and draw a line one mile inland in the Hampton area.

You’ll know whether or not if this is truly viewed as a random event or not by what the insurance companies do and I predict they’re going to be drawing their own lines up and down the coast and reassessing what they charge.

I think many of us were not totally shocked at far inland Andrew, Katrina and Ike came on the southern coast but now we know that cities like New York are apparently just as vulnerable to these surges as New Orleans.

What would be interesting would be to see if these flooded areas of New York and New Jersey have been flooded to the same extent inland during prior decades storms.

I’m quite sure that development has increased especially given the subsidized flood insurance program and that will affect the costs.

so thinking about that – I’m not sure that just looking at costs alone will reveal much.

but looking at how far inland these surges have occurred and how often might be worth a look.

I’m sure the insurance companies are going to be looking at this if they have not already because they have to look at things long term in order to properly assess risk and the cost of insuring.

but again – if it turns out that these surges used to be once in a hundred years and now are occurring more frequently and affecting larger land areas … it would be a potent indicator that something is changing… and is going to have significant economic impacts.

and then we could argue on a cost-effective basis which was better – betting that GW was a conspiratorial ruse of conniving scientists or believing the science that the vast majority of scientists believe.

I would posit that another “Sandy” in a year or two is going to cause some re-thinking. But if we don’t see another one for a generation, then we’ll be ok.

Support Bacon’s Rebellion

We can't work for free. (Wish we could, but we can't.) Please help keep this blog going through a voluntary subscription. Become an "agitator," a "bomb thrower" or a "full-fledged rebel" by your level of support.

Archives

Subscribe to RSS Feed

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 78 other subscribers

Email Address

About Bacon’s Rebellion

Bacon's Rebellion is Virginia's leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

Boomergeddon

Boomergeddon is the day investors stop buying U.S. Treasuries — the day the U.S. government goes into default, the global economy is thrown into turmoil, the American empire begins to crumble, and the social safety net starts to unravel. Buy the book here.

Thunder on the Mountain

Since the mid-1800s, Appalachian coal has been a regional curse and a blessing. It has generated great wealth reflected today in philanthropy boosting universities and hospitals. It has also been a curse, locking coalfield people in a perpetual cycle of poverty, ruining mountain environments and killing miners. This book explores Massey Energy, formerly based in Richmond, in its notorious recent history that has involved a renegade chief executive, big political money and this country’s worst deep mining disaster in 40 years.

In a recent article in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, law student Paige Pavone criticizes suburban apartments and condominiums as “green sprawl” because they “merely add density to suburban sprawl and exacerbate the very problems smart growth seeks to correct.” … Continue reading →

One more takeaway from the Resilient Virginia launch conference yesterday: All other things being equal, more compact communities are more resilient communities. Like Bacon’s Rebellion, Cooper Martin, program director of the Sustainable Cities Institute, is a big fan of Joe … Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon If you were a manufacturing company contemplating an expansion to Hampton Roads, you would take into account traditional criteria such as proximity to customers and suppliers, access to a skilled workforce, transportation connections, prevailing wage levels, taxes and so … Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon The key to building a strong resiliency movement – making communities more adaptable in the face of natural and man-made disasters — is finding common ground. So argued Steven McNulty, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Southeast … Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon The debate still rages over the extent to which young Americans, especially members of the Millennial generation, are moving back to the urban core. Data published by Luke Juday on the StatChat blog should settle that … Continue reading →

Fascinating data from Governing magazine comparing auto dependency of various municipalities around the United States: Arlington, Alexandria and the City of Richmond led the pack in Virginia as the least auto-dependent, with Norfolk, Lynchburg and Roanoke close behind. There are … Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon We continually hear about an “infrastructure crisis” in the United States, a malady from which Virginia has not been spared. Talk of pot-holed streets, tottering bridges and crumbling highways invariably moves to talk about the need to … Continue reading →

Progressives often argue that conservatives are anti-science because many conservatives deny the reality and seriousness of climate change, and some religious conservatives reject the theory of evolution. But some progressives are as skeptical of the conventional wisdom of economics as … Continue reading →

The ordinarily responsible Governing magazine is running a study of gentrification on its website; the study purports to show high levels of gentrification in some cities. For example, the study claims that 29 percent of New York’s poor census tracts have gentrified. … Continue reading →

After a variety of conservative groups (including some funded by the Koch brothers) sent a letter to Congress opposing gas tax increases, the liberal and urbanist blogospheres were chock full of stories like this one, complaining that Congress can’t reach … Continue reading →